[iwar] [fc:Killer.troops.ready.to.fight.new-era.war.AFTER.THE.ASSAULT]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-21 07:18:41
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 07:18:41 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Killer.troops.ready.to.fight.new-era.war.AFTER.THE.ASSAULT]
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Special operations forces a cut above
Killer troops ready to fight new-era war AFTER THE ASSAULT
David Wood - Newhouse News Service
Friday, September 21, 2001

Washington --- Seeking to ''smoke out'' and ''get'' the terrorists 
responsible for last week's suicide attacks, President Bush is mobilizing 
America's own relentless stealth warriors. 
Behind a screen of aircraft carriers, fighter jets and Marines en route to 
southwestern Asia, the U.S. Army Rangers and Special Forces are being called 
on for intense, covert, risky operations that U.S. officials say will 
characterize a new era of war in the 21st century. 
About 8,000 in number, these soldiers are hand-picked, psychologically 
screened and physically and mentally hardened. In training, a Ranger 
instructor says, ''We shred all the veneer a person has, to get down to the 
core.'' They master their craft of close-quarter combat with the focus and 
intensity of surgeons. 
''They are ready to go,'' Army Secretary John White said Thursday, after 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed an order authorizing the deployment 
of special operations units and other Army troops. 
Pressure-cooker lifestyle 
Self-confessed adrenalin junkies, these troops consume special rations and 
unlimited training ammunition. They revel in a brutal, pressure-cooker 
lifestyle that forges a blinding loyalty to each other and hardens them to 
the stress and sacrifice of combat. (Hair, advises a Ranger manual, 
''complicates good hygiene.'') 
They don't do peacekeeping or feed hungry children. But they do operate amid 
moral ambiguity --- practicing, for instance, to intuitively separate enemy 
fighters from noncombatants, as civilian police SWAT teams do. If a woman is 
armed and shooting at you, a Ranger officer instructs, shoot back. 
They are lightly armed, and they operate mostly at night, relying on 
surprise, speed and shock. They specialize in precisely the kind of missions 
that seem needed now: showing up where they're not expected and taking the 
bad guys, as Bush said this week, ''dead or alive.'' 
''Highly targeted, a very precise use of violence --- they are really a kind 
of law enforcement: a global posse,'' said Robert Killebrew, a retired Army 
planner. 
Special forces would operate, as they did during the Persian Gulf War, under 
a screen of strike aircraft and with Air Force search-and-rescue units on 
standby or in the air nearby. 
Among their means of arrival: insertion by special stealth helicopters flown 
by Air Force special operations units, or by special parachutes that enable 
them to glide 10 miles after jumping so the target never hears their plane. 
Another technique, called a high-altitude low-opening (HALO) jump, calls for 
jumping at 25,000 feet or higher to avoid detection and then free-falling to 
the normal military jump height of 500 feet before popping one's chute. 
Rangers who jumped under fire into Panama in 1989 during Operation Just Cause 
carried 115 pounds of gear. Normally, a Ranger squad might carry carbines, an 
M240 light machine gun and a recoilless rifle. 
Rangers and Special Forces will excel at missions like hunting down 
terrorists in remote terrain where they are outnumbered, because they accept 
the conditions of close-quarter combat, said retired Army Col. Ralph Puckett. 
''It's pretty dirty, obscene and dangerous --- and the Rangers accept that,'' 
said Puckett, who fought in Korea and Vietnam and is the honorary colonel of 
the 75th Ranger Regiment. ''One of the things that has hurt our nation in the 
past is that we think we can fight a war surgically with few or no 
casualties.'' 
There are about 2,300 Rangers split among three battalions based at Fort 
Benning, Ga., Hunter Army Airfield, Ga., and Fort Lewis, Wash., with 
regimental headquarters at Fort Benning. 
Kentucky unit's area 
Special Forces are divided into five groups, with about 1,300 soldiers per 
group. Each group is assigned to a region; 5th Special Forces Group, based at 
Fort Campbell, Ky., is assigned to the Middle East, and as such would be the 
first to respond to an operational tasking there. 
The Rangers, fortuitously, fit perfectly into a new era of conflict that some 
strategists have long forecast, calling it ''fourth generation'' warfare. 
In this kind of conflict, the enemy avoids taking the United States on 
directly, striking instead at American vulnerabilities and then melting back 
into the shadows. There are no front lines, no battlefields and little 
distinction between military and civilian. 
Against the kind of organization fielded by suspected terrorist mastermind 
Osama bin Laden, U.S. conventional forces may not be directly useful. Air 
strikes on Afghanistan, for instance, likely would prove ineffective against 
dug-in terrorists even if they could be found. 
And ordinary U.S. combat units, sent to hunt down bin Laden cadres, could 
fail catastrophically. 
In 1993 street battles in Mogadishu, Somalia, where operatives of bin Laden 
commanded mobs against U.S. troops, ''simple handheld weapons used by 
well-disciplined, small irregular units turned armored vehicles and 
helicopters into coffins and conventional formations into death traps,'' said 
Army Maj. Donald Vandergriff, a tank officer and analyst. 
Eventually, such fourth generation ''irregulars'' will have to be confronted 
by Special Forces, men willing to take on the world's most vicious fighters 
face to face. 
Tough as they are, ''These guys are not street thugs,'' Col. Stanley 
McChrystal said in 1998, when he commanded the 75th Ranger Regiment and was 
interviewed for a series on the Rangers. 
''These are middle-class kids who want to be in something special. They're 
not just waiting for the next throat to cut. But yeah, they can fight,'' said 
McChrystal, now a brigadier general who heads the XVIII Airborne Corps staff 
at Fort Bragg, N.C. 
He allowed that Rangers would face ''a steep learning curve'' when they go 
into action against dedicated and merciless killers. 
''We won't be given weeks to get bloodied, and for most of [the Rangers] it 
will be their first experience in combat,'' he said. 
That is why their training is so stressful, he said. ''But we can never 
replicate the horrors they will find in combat.'' 
Ignored a decade ago 
The adaption of terrorists to fourth generation warfare was seen more than a 
decade ago by some analysts, but widely ignored by the Defense Department. 
''The distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing 
point'' without clear fronts or battlefields, five authors wrote in the 
Marine Corps Gazette in 1989. 
They warned specifically that terrorists would make use of this new kind of 
warfare to attack U.S. vulnerabilities. Lacking technology, they warned, 
Islamic terrorists would ''attempt to bypass [the U.S.] military entirely and 
strike directly at [the American] homeland at civilian targets.'' 
The terrorists' goal is to make the U.S. military ''simply irrelevant,'' 
wrote Army Cols. Keith Nightengale and Joseph W. Sutton, Marine Lt. Col. G.I. 
Wilson, Marine Capt. John F. Schmidt, and William S. Lind, a civilian 
analyst. 
As U.S. bombs fall, the enemy ''will sit with bleeding eardrums and wait for 
us to come,'' Lt. Col. Eric Hutchings, a Ranger officer, observed in the 
Newhouse series. 
''They will want to separate us from our technology, to pull us into the 
trenchline. We want to win that fight," Hutchings said. "We want them to know 
they are facing somebody willing to take this to the extreme.'' 

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